{"id":813,"date":"2019-12-16T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2019-12-16T10:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/?p=813"},"modified":"2019-12-14T08:09:40","modified_gmt":"2019-12-14T08:09:40","slug":"is-gay-marriage-a-genuinely-progressive-social-transformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/openfordebate\/is-gay-marriage-a-genuinely-progressive-social-transformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Gay Marriage a Genuinely Progressive Social Transformation?"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 22nd<\/sup> May 2015, many referendum voters in the Republic of Ireland made history: 62.07 % of them stated that they were in favour of legalising same-sex marriage. Yep, 62.07 % of voters in the Hibernian bastion of repressive Catholic theocracy since 1937. For so many actively campaigning for LGBTQ rights and combatting the oppressiveness of heteronormativity, the long-standing ideology that the ultimate life goal for society is heterosexual marriage with the goal of having children through the traditional nuclear family structure, this was a cause for celebration. Liberals had struck a progressive blow against bigoted bishops, dodgy deacons, and creepy cardinals \u2013 gays and lesbians no longer had to hide and express their love in the safe, private quarters of LGBTQ circles. They could now be free to legitimate their love in the wider public sphere. Hooray!<\/p>\n

Now, from a left-wing perspective, isn\u2019t the extension of gay marriage to homosexual couples obviously a good thing? Surely<\/em>, I would have to be homophobic or a religious traditionalist to claim that there is something disconcerting about gay marriage and that progressives are perhaps wrong to construe the legalisation of gay marriage as a bona fide <\/em>exemplar of progressive social change? Well, no. I\u2019m definitely not, at any cognitive and political level, homophobic. I\u2019m also definitely not, again at any cognitive or political level, a religious traditionalist.<\/p>\n

Yet, as a critical social theorist, I continue to be very concerned about the disconcertingly uncritical features of the whiggish proclamation that gay marriage is a profound victory for LGBTQ rights and an ostensible marker for radical, modern, democratic transformation. Following Judith Butler\u2019s pioneering queer theoretical distinction, I am politically supportive but critically accepting of gay marriage<\/em>. Purely in order to counter homophobic discourses am I supportive <\/em>of gay marriage. However, I do not want to be, therefore, in favour<\/em> of gay marriage. Why?<\/p>\n

For all of the putative attractiveness of the inclusion of homosexual relations as legitimate instances of the social institution of marriage, there are good reasons to believe that the liberal claim to progressiveness and the claim to the revision of traditional conceptions of the family following the 2015 referendum\u2019s seismic result occlude severe structural problematics with how modern democratic states constitute the family. To be meaningfully progressive, I think one must displace liberal egalitarianism and static conceptions of recognition with conceptions of justice and family life that are not blind to structural inequalities facing marginalised social groups<\/em>.<\/p>\n

From a critical perspective influenced by the remarkable resources of queer theory, gay marriage masquerades itself as a radical social achievement, and is in fact a coded ideology serving to create a pathological genus of doubt about the metaphysical legitimacy of non-marital relationships. This particular variety of doubt is crippling and deeply distressing, preventing a healthy practical-relation-to-one\u2019s-beloved. For example, if your lover is not officially recognised, can you even mourn for them? If your lover is not officially recognised, can you even be said to have lost them if the relationship ends? Marriage \u2013 whether heterosexual or homosexual<\/em> \u2013 as the institution which legitimates family, kinship and sexual relations between partners is painfully conservative. As Judith Butler puts it:<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re not real, it can be hard to sustain yourselves over time; the sense of delegitimation can make it harder to sustain a bond, a bond that is not real anyway, a bond that does not \u201cexist,\u201d that never had a chance to exist, that was never meant to exist. Here is where the absence of state legitimation can emerge within the psyche as a pervasive, if not fatal, sense of self doubt. And if you\u2019ve actually lost the lover who was never recognised to be your lover, then did you really lose that person? Is this a loss, and can it be publicly grieved? Surely this is something that has become a pervasive problem in the queer community, given the losses from AIDS, the loss of lives and loves that are always in struggle to be recognised as such\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What makes a group a family? Something like that group having caring relationships towards one another and sharing domestic space, at the very least, right? As Hegel rightly contended, family life is built, not on marriage, but on and sustained by the uplifting intersubjective qualities of love<\/em>. Marriage, therefore, plays no grounding role in making a sense of what a family is. Rather, its ideological purpose is to function as the social institution for metaphysically <\/em>constituting family life by legally<\/em> constituting family life. If anything, there are many families that are not structured around a marriage:<\/p>\n